At a little after nine o’clock on Friday morning, federal agents walked into Maravida Senior Living, a care home in central Florida, and came out with an 82-year-old man in a wheelchair and handcuffs. The man had one leg. He had spent the past year learning to walk again after an amputation in the Philippines. And for the best part of a decade he had been, to millions of people around the world, the very picture of a wronged father: the lonely old lighting technician cast aside by a daughter who had married a prince.
His name, of course, is Thomas Markle, and the case against him is now not a family feud, nor a tabloid splash, nor a set of claims from an estranged son. It is a federal criminal complaint, filed in the US District Court in Los Angeles, charging him with one count of possession of child pornography. If he is convicted, he faces up to twenty years in prison. He has not been convicted of anything. He has not entered a plea. He has, until now, denied every allegation against him. But the shape of this story has changed completely, and it is worth setting out exactly how.
The complaint, and the FBI affidavit behind it, were filed on Thursday and announced on Friday by the Justice Department. They say that agents, acting under judicial warrants, searched two storage units in the Los Angeles area that were registered to Markle and that, according to the affidavit, he had rented continuously since 2008. The most recent payments, it says, had gone through by automatic transfer the previous month. Inside, agents seized about 78 items: slides, 35mm film negatives and books, which the FBI says contained child sexual abuse material.
The affidavit describes three images in particular. Two, it alleges, show an adult man, whom a witness has identified as Markle, with a prepubescent girl. The third shows a prepubescent girl in what appears to be a room in a motel chain in the Philippines. The affidavit also refers to other photographs allegedly showing Markle with children in various stages of undress. CNN’s headline put it bluntly: according to the Justice Department, the photographs show him sexually abusing minors. They are, it must be repeated, allegations, set out by prosecutors, and they have not been tested by a court. But they are not the sort of allegations one writes off as a son’s revenge.
“These allegations are extremely serious,” said Bill Essayli, the First Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles, “and we will prosecute Mr Markle to the fullest extent of federal law.” The FBI Director, Kash Patel, said Markle “allegedly targeted innocent children and sought to steal their innocence through his criminal actions”. The FBI’s Los Angeles office has asked anyone with information to come forward.
How did the FBI get there? According to the affidavit, the investigation began in October, when US law enforcement learned that someone had signed an affidavit in the Philippines describing the discovery of suspected abuse material among Markle’s belongings. That person appears to be Thomas Markle Jr, who told the Sun last month that he had found “hundreds, if not thousands” of child sexual abuse images in four boxes at his father’s former home in Cebu, and who reported them to Philippine police and the FBI. A second witness then told investigators that Markle rented a storage unit in the Los Angeles area. Information from the first witness led agents to a second one. Both were searched, and the complaint followed.
Notice what that means. Until Friday, the story rested on Thomas Jr’s account of what he found in Cebu, which his father insisted was a stitch-up by a vengeful son, and on what the Daily Mail said its reporter found in an abandoned lock-up in Rosarito, Mexico, which a newspaper, not the police, had searched. The California units are different. They were searched by federal agents, under warrant, and their contents are now evidence in a criminal case. And they had, on the FBI’s account, been rented in Markle’s name since 2008, and paid for until last month. Whatever else may be said about them, they were not planted by anyone in Cebu.
On Friday afternoon Markle appeared before a federal magistrate judge in Tampa. He was released pending trial, on conditions of home detention and electronic monitoring. No plea was entered, and an arraignment is not expected for several weeks. It is not yet clear who is representing him, or when he will be moved to California to face the charge.
His public position until now has been one of total denial. When the Philippine allegations surfaced last month, he called them “just a bunch of lies. It’s sick.” “I’m shocked, I’m hurt and I’m very upset that my son is making these accusations against me,” he said. “I could never do what I’m being accused of.” He said he had never downloaded anything of the kind, that the computers in Cebu had not been in his possession since he left Mexico in January 2025, that he did not know who had had access to them, and that he would welcome a forensic examination. He said he had “never been in a photograph like that”. He has now got his forensic examination, though perhaps not quite in the form he imagined. When the Mail asked him, before his arrest, whether he was a paedophile, it says he answered “no”, but did not answer when asked whether he had possessed child pornography.
The rest of the family has been quieter. Thomas Jr, who said last month that he believed the man he had spent years defending and caring for was “a monster”, has said nothing further in public that I have been able to find. Samantha Markle, who has spent eight years as her father’s fiercest defender and the Duchess’s most relentless critic, and who was quick to call her brother’s claims “disgusting lies”, has, for once, nothing to say. Her boyfriend’s doorstep defence to the Mail last month, that the material in the Philippines bore none of her father’s fingerprints and that the statute of limitations had in any case “ran out”, has aged badly.
And then there is Meghan. Buckingham Palace and her spokesperson have not commented on the arrest. But she said in October that she was “deeply distressed” by the allegations, that “my thoughts are with any children who may have been harmed”, and that her distance from her father, and her decision not to let him near Archie and Lilibet, had been “for one reason: to protect them”. She said she had been shown a letter making allegations against him, which the Met has since said it received in January 2019, and had been assured the claims were being investigated. “I trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families,” she said. “My sincerest hope is that justice will be fully served.”
I have written before, and I will say again, that if what is alleged turns out to be true, the Duchess will have been right about her father on the central question, and a great many of us who cast him as the injured party will have been wrong. That is uncomfortable for those of us, and I am one, who have spent years being rude about her. It does not dissolve the questions about what was said in public in the meantime, about Oprah and the paparazzi photographs and the Netflix series, or about why, if she believed in 2019 that her father was a danger to children, nobody in the Sussex household ever seems to have chased up the Met when nothing happened. But those are questions about her judgement. The question about her father’s conduct is now in the hands of a federal court, which is precisely where it belongs.
So, too, is the question about Scotland Yard, and it has not got any more comfortable for the Met. The force received a letter, now understood to have been written by Markle’s late first wife, Roslyn Loveless, raising “a number of claims about alleged offending outside the United Kingdom”. It concluded, rightly, that the letter had nothing to do with anybody’s security, and then, instead of passing it to the FBI, posted it to a royal private office “for their awareness”. The police watchdog is now investigating that failure. If the American charge is proved, it will mean that British police were handed allegations about a man in 2019 and sat on them for nearly seven years, while the evidence, on the FBI’s account, sat in two storage units in Los Angeles, paid for by direct debit.
What happens now? Markle will be transferred to California to face the complaint. Prosecutors will need to obtain an indictment from a grand jury, and he will then be arraigned and enter a plea. The Philippine investigation, in which a Cebu court granted police a warrant last month to examine the devices handed over by his son, continues separately; he has not been charged there. The Met says it is making referrals to overseas law enforcement agencies. And the man at the centre of it, who is 82, in a wheelchair and in poor health, will wait at home with an electronic tag for a trial that could, if he is convicted, mean he never leaves prison.
There is one thing we do not know, and it is the only thing that ultimately matters: whether he did it. The affidavit alleges a great deal. A witness has identified him in photographs. The units were in his name for eighteen years. But a criminal complaint is the prosecution’s case, not a verdict, and Thomas Markle, like anyone else, is innocent unless the government proves otherwise beyond reasonable doubt. I have argued that principle for Russell Brand, for David Walliams and for Prince Andrew, and I would be a hypocrite to abandon it for a man the tabloids have suddenly turned against.
But I will say this. For eight years, the story of Thomas Markle was told as a tragedy about a father and a daughter, a story about fame, money, Harry, Oprah and the press. It may turn out that we were all telling the wrong story. If the FBI is right, the real story was never about the royal family at all. It was in a couple of lock-ups in Los Angeles, quietly paid for every month, for the best part of two decades, while the rest of us argued about who had been rude to whom.